Cost and Value in Health Professions Education

The Harvard Macy Institute Podcast aims to connect our Harvard Macy Institute community and to develop our interest in health professions education topics and literature. Our podcast is hosted by our Program for Educators in the Health Professions course faculty Victoria Brazil, and will feature interviews with health professions education authors and their research papers.

Podcast S2E1 features Kieran Walsh, Clinical Director at the British Medical Journal (BMJ), discussing cost and value in health professions education.

Health professions education is expensive, but we hope ‘worth it’ for our patients and communities. In this episode Victoria Brazil interviews Kieran Walsh. He is the clinical lead of the medical education and clinical decision support products at BMJ, including BMJ Best Practice.

He has a keen interest in cost and value in health professions education, and we discuss terminology, concepts, and practical applications in the field. What are the real costs, and how do we calculate them? Where do we look for determination of value or effectiveness? How does this apply to examples like online learning or simulation? Why should we do cost effectiveness research, and why haven’t we done much of it up to this point.

For more on this work, Kieran is part of the Society for Cost and Value in Health Professions Education (SCVHPE).

Victoria Brazil, MD (Educators, ’05, Leaders ’07, Assessment ‘10) is Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of Simulation at Bond University Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine. Her research interests include podcasting and simulation, and she is co-producer of Simulcast - a podcast about health care simulation. Victoria can be followed on Twitter.